Sometimes feel like _I'm_ a rat in a maze of doom.
Rats in Doom VR
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#32Can they navigate turns, or are they just being conditioned to run in a straight line for sugar? Interesting exploration though.
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Re: Rats in Doom VR
#33Does anyone notice how he used a trackball mouse design to track their motion in VR? I feel like there is a clever joke in there somewhere.
Just reinforcing the stereotype that a rat is just a giant mouse
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#34Re: Rats in Doom VR
#35I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Cave Johnson got started at Aperture Science... https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Cave_Johnson
Nah, I think they were making shower curtains.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#36seems cruel to me.
You would really hate to see the mouse house and depending labs of any research hospital then. The mice here are living a life of luxury by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know you or someone else will come out against those practices as well; I would love to hear ideas for a replacement or a proposal to just stop science and progress all together.
There are loads of smart people advocating for alternatives to animal testing.
Easy example from Johns Hopkins: the center for alternatives to animal testing https://caat.jhsph.edu/
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#37This is insanely heartless.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#38This is insanely heartless.
That's a little strong. Arguably a bit inhumane but nothing like what we put them through for drug tests I'm sure.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did not Feynman use rat experiments in his book to lay heavily into social studies? As i recall in the book, there was only one guy whose rat/mouse experiments had enough rigour, eliminating data disturbing experiment influences, systematically.
The moral of that story, IMO, is not "don't do experiments with rodents" or even "bio/psych is nonsense." Instead, the point is that a good scientist has to aggressively consider possible explanations for your data and possible experimental confounds. This is much, much harder when studying subjects that have some agency of their own, like rats or humans.
It gets even worse outside of science. I'm sure most people who've been in the business world long have noticed that attempts to eliminate confounding factors when drawing conclusions are rarely even attempted unless the results contradict what the highest-on-the-org-chart interested party wants it to be (and even then, they're usually just ignored rather than any attack on their validity actually being made).
For all the attempts to measure stuff and be "scientific", businesses mostly run on gut feelings, even when they're doing "experiments" or "collecting data in order to make informed decisions" or whatever. Often it's really easy to spot problems with these processes, but no-one cares as long as the PowerPoint slides say what they want them to say and pretend to be backed by data.
Re: Rats in Doom VR
#40To folks saying this is heartless, I'd urge you to scroll down to the "Experiment" section of the article:
> I received three 8-week-old male Long Evans rats, Romero, Carmack and Tom. Romero was fearless (more like thrill-seeking) and loved grapes. Carmack was a real architect building around its home keeping it tidy; he was fond of bananas. Tom began shy, but held the most surprises in learning performance.
> I spent around 6 weeks with them during their (and my) night cycle, ~1 hour with each daily. It took two weeks to habituate them to me — this process could be accelerated, I was just a little slow with them. One week to teach them to stay put while I was dressing them; I also tested multiple harnesses and their combinations during this time.
It seems to me from this that the rats were well-cared for and the author formed a bond with them, considering how he seems to fondly recount their personality quirks.